Free expression Hossein created one of the first blogs in Persian last year.

"It was a good tool to get to know what is happening in Iran," he told the BBC programme Go Digital, "what the youth are talking about, what are their problems." He had so much interest from Iran that he decided to write a simple guide in Persian, to help others set up their own blogs.

Seven months on, there are more than 1,200 Persian blogs, many of them written by women.

The web is providing a way for women in Iran to talk freely about taboo subjects such as sex and boyfriends.

Over the past few months there has been a big jump in the number of Persian weblogs which are providing an insight into a closed society.

Weblogs, or blogs, are online journals where cyber-diarists let the world in on the latest twists and turns of their love, work and internal lives."I could talk very freely and very frankly about things I could never talk about in any other place, about subjects that are banned" said one of the first women to start a blog in Iran.Underground lives The rise of the blog in Iran has been made possible by the huge growth of the internet in the Middle Eastern country.There were 400,000 people on the internet in Iran in 2001, according to government figures.But officials expect this it grow to 15m over the next three or four years.Contrary to expectation, the internet in Iran is not censored.